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I've been out of the webmaster thing for a few years, when a club I am a member of needed someone to take over, I got volunteered.
Past experiences with phpbb based CMS, and OSCommerce at least left me with memories of long unproductive evenings, frustration and a learning curve that went straight up seemingly forever.
Trying to 'fix' the former site, while transferring and archiving data from former to new hosting, I found many of the scripts I was familiar with had fallen by the wayside. (probably for the best)
Looking for a way to replace lost or damaged features, I came across OCP.
In just a few days, I was able to get a good base for the club to work from, and retained 10 yrs worth of post data.
I have to admit, I parallel installed a handful of options across subdirectories; and found the easiest to work with being OCP.
Former site was SMF 1.x.x, upgraded to 2.x.x. without a backup. MKportal quit, Gallery quit, etc. Every feature the club had to promote itself broke.
Hosting with an undesirable provider was rapidly coming to an end, and no one had access to the backend.
Finally managed to gain access with little time on the clock to recover all I could and find a new host.
Duplicated (or tried) to recreate what 'was', fixing what I could with archaic scripts with hopes of finding a means to port it over to something more modern.
A lot of wasted hours spent fussing and relearning bad habits.
Anyway, the site at least runs, carried over data from other forums and half-baked, cobbled together scripts. While it's still in default colors and templates, the users and board of directors are impressed with the completeness and integration of features.
My imposed deadlines are past, the pressure is off. Now we can take our time learning how all this works, and enjoy it.
In closing, I have to say I enjoyed the respect from developers to users the most. In my experience this is not the norm. In some ways I wish we'd paid to have OCP to migrate the mess, on the other hand I would have missed out seeing professional, and courteous responses to questions.
-Wayne Brown
www.columbiamac.org